Sudden unstable connection

[#1]

Hello, 

Since the 16th of June my previously stable and reliable connection has become unstable in that pages often will not load, services such as Steam or EA will struggle to login and remain connected, and VPNs, such as the one I use for work, will not connect at all. The page loading issue seems to come and go every few minutes, sometimes pages load quickly without issue, but then the next moment nothing will load, sometimes leading to the request timing out entirely. My phone simply saying the connection is not providing internet and goes back to data every few minutes, to the point where I have given up on the Wi-Fi entirely at home on my phone. Services like YouTube (in 4K) seem to work quite stable, and BBC iPlayer once the video player itself loads and the video is on. 

I contacted Plusnet support yesterday evening (18th) in the evening since nothing had improved with checking the cabling, a router reboot and waiting it out - things that so often seem to fix issues. This created a "question" and the Plusnet Robot claimed there was a fault and it had been raised with the suppliers for investigation.

This afternoon (19th) just before 4pm I received a message to say "Our suppliers have advised us that they have fixed the issue you reported to us.
We have run further diagnostics and we can see that your service is now working as expected."

Given I am here now, you can guess I have seen no improvement what so ever, so I called Plusnet and explained this, so they added to the open "question" the same message as yesterday evening, and again said "We’ve raised this fault to our suppliers who are currently investigating the fault.".

The lady on the phone today suggested that a remote fix had been attempted today, which had obviously not been enough to fix the issue. What issue they believe they identified and fixed from afar, I do not know.  

I am not sure if there is much I can do but wait and keep at Plusnet support for something to be done, but I am open to ideas. I am located in Edinburgh, if anyone else has been having similar issues in the last few days that came out of the blue it would be good to hear from you too. 

Thanks

[#2]

What’s your location.  Apparently BTOR has some major issues covering a lot of STD codes in the north.

[#3]

Hello, I am in Edinburgh.

[#4]

There have been two recent service issues in the general area...

Maintenance Reference: PW1748532015

Start:	15/06/2025 23:05
Cleared:	16/06/2025 05:00
Duration:	5 Hours 55 Minutes
Message:	Planned Engineering Works - Full Outage:
Area Codes:	01206 01223 01245 01255 01314 01315 01412 01413 01414 01415 01651 01702 01905 01932 01957 02893

Maintenance Reference: PW1748861708

Start:	16/06/2025 23:05
Cleared:	17/06/2025 05:00
Duration:	5 Hours 55 Minutes
Message:	Planned Engineering Works - Full Outage:
Area Codes:	01245 01268 01277 01313 01314 01315 01553 02843 02892

[#5]

Those would certainly tie in with the 16th when I first noticed these issues. Still waiting for an update from Plusnet after yesterday's follow-up call and them saying they would get an engineer to look into it for a second time.

[#6]

Hey @Stozy Thank you for reaching out to us, I'm sorry to hear of the issues experienced with the broadband recently. 

I have reviewed your account and seems that a notification was sent to you this morning, Openreach have notified us that the issue is resolved now. 

If you haven't already, please can you restart your router and run a further speed test, please let me know if the matter has been addressed or whether we need to look into this further. 

Look forward to hearing from you soon 

[#7]

Hi @Tina11192 ,

Thanks for your response. 

There does seem to have been some improvement since midday when I got the most recent resolved message through. I can now connect to my work VPN on desktop and stability has been good so far. I have not noticed any disconnects or drops in connection on the desktop, where previously they were frequent.  

However, my phone remains unhappy with the connection. When putting on the Wi-Fi it warns that there is no/limited connection and will frequently disconnect entirely and switch back to data. If turning off data to force the Wi-Fi the connection will simply not work for a minute or so every few minutes, briefly showing the "!" next to the Wi-Fi symbol before seemingly working OK again for a few minutes or so. The signal itself seems to remain, but a working connection is lacking. This is the same issue as I was having all devices for the past few days. I did try using a VPN on my phone too, but it switched to data while connected so presumably didn't make much difference. 

So in summary, there seems to have been some improvement, but the connection is certainly not back to how it was before the last few days of issues appeared. Never used to have any connectivity issues at all. 

Please do let me know if there is any additional information I can provide. Thanks.

[#8]

@Tina11192 (or anyone available) I can quite confidently say at this point the issue is unresolved. Why things seem to improve when I managed to connect to my work VPN I don't know, its a fairly basic SSL style connection. Everything else remains as was, intermittent, unreliable, and quite frustrating. 

It is getting quite tiring having to chase Plusnet to fix this issue, when each time it is claimed to be resolved and each time nothing on my end has improved. Is there an avenue I can take that gets this looked at in a serious manner without this constant back and forth? Claiming to have resolved an issue multiple times that has not been resolved isn't inspiring confidence. 

Thanks. 

[#9 · Accepted solution]

A core BT network issue has been identified impacting a few users around Edinburgh ... which has been resolved this afternoon.  Please restart your router.

[#10]

Thanks for the information and help, Townman. It does seem the issue is now resolved as of this afternoon/evening. Hopefully no more frustration! 

Somewhat ironic given Plusnet just sent me a new router to try and solve the problem which arrived today and remains in the box, having claimed again on Saturday there were no network issues. Hopefully it can be reused when sent back. 

[#11]

There are network issues and there are networks!!

When CSC state that there are no network issues, they are looking at the network connection between the exchange and your home.  This network issue was higher up the chain on BT’s internal network, which is not within the usual CSC test scope.